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Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Actiontrack Diary 2011

Our Transition Year are currently at the mid-point of their Actiontrack Showbuild process, culminating in the show itself on Friday night in the BSR. One of their number, Eleanor Dolphin, is blogging on the experience. Here are her entries for the first three days:-

Day 1:As all 33 of us 4th years gathered in the BSR this morning, I could easily distinguish which people had done this before, the newbies to the year impersonating lost lambs while the rest of us looked on expectantly. We were introduced to the Actiontrack team; Nathan, Molly, Nick and Katie, who will be helping us put together a show. To warm up we played the legendary zip zap boing: it was nice to see that after 2 years I was still just as useless at it. The second half of the morning saw us split into groups where we had to make four inanimate objects out of our own bodies. So, people came up with human swings and blenders. We then had to work a story around these objects and then change the genre of the story to silent movie, sci-fi etc. This really got our imagination and creativity active, I think. At the end of the day we each had to come up with 2 song titles and then come up with lyrics for them.

Day 2:We started off with a bang today by playing a game called Trinidad and zip zap boing again (hotel, motel and bungalow were introduced today). At the end of yesterday we came up with lyrics for our song titles, the Actiontrack team took our ideas and mashed them into 6 songs: Loose lips, the hero in the dirty tracksuit, hostile room, golden shoes, I’m starting again and black eyes. So for a huge part of the day, we practised the songs and tried to improve them. I think that this part was good fun and that it felt like good progress to all of us. After lunch Katie did a drawing/ visual exercise with us, where each person got a page and drew a squiggly line on it. We all passed our page onto the person next to us and they had to make something out of the lines. You couldn’t use text so the exercise helped us tune in to our visual description rather than explain in words.

Day 3:Again we ran through the songs this morning and we worked out who the solo singers are going to be. Then Molly got us to do a kind of rhythm and dance workout. Then just before break we all talked about the plot of the play and we looked at the skeleton of the different aspects of the play like the set design, music of the band and choreography. We were each assigned different roles in the play and for the rest of the day Nick and Molly worked with some of us on our scenes as well as the choreography. Others worked on the set design, costume design and the band had their first practice.